


Expressed through hologram- the gods have gone wrong.

by creatorRunning



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Death, Genderfluid Character, Gods, M/M, Post-Canon, Usually reliable narrator, godtier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:34:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 8,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24166675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatorRunning/pseuds/creatorRunning
Summary: A bizarre trip into what happens after canon. How do gods adjust to power?
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Roxy Lalonde/Gamzee Makara (implied)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	1. The notetaker's notes

Do you know how power works?

How it really, actually works? Because if you let it, you will be consumed by your power.

You cannot wear the crown without the crown wearing you. And if 100 people have the opportunity to wear that crown, the end result will be that the ones who most change to fit the crown will wear it the longest. Law of the fucking land. Power does not just corrupt, it attracts the corrupted and corruptible.

Now, imagine the ways power might twist you, not over a decade, not over a century, but over eons. And not just ordinary, comforting power, the power elected by a democracy and as real as a web of dreams, nor even the more sinister, but as imaginary, power of the brutal regime, but the extraordinary, the aberration in physics’ neat rows and columns of precisely calculated energy.

Are you imagining it? Having difficulty? Can you picture the twisted, gnarled roots that find their way into any open facet of your being?

Imagine twisting elements to your fingers, those elements not spoken of by science but by some deeper primal conviction- FIRE and water, WIND and blood, TIME and void, LIFE and doom. Fear and motherfucking RAGE.

can you see it? the aberrative fucking lines?

ARE YOU FUCKING SEEING IT?

hehe.

I BET YOU THINK YOU ARE.

nah.

YOU DON’T SEE.

but I can motherfucking _show_ you.

HONK.

honk.

:o)

These blasphemous fools ruled as gods. Small G. The capitalization is something they haven’t earned yet.

They messed about. They drifted apart. Was it so surprising that some of them might have left, packed up to the stars and started again? Was it so shocking to imagine that their fate might be to flee from the only people who actually understand them, given an eternity to do so? Hell is other people, and they feel the same to you as you do them: utter fucking disgust.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More to follow.


	2. Deltirus, and becoming a wasteland.

Dirk Strider went, of course, with Rose Lalonde, to make their own games. They were unique. Never bored by each other, but always endlessly irritated. Another note: in all the time I’ve followed their story, I’ve never known either of them to blink.

They played in the universe’s refuse, building up a town, a city, blowing it up with meteors, rebuilding a civilisation, making them fight, making them ally, making them die.

Amusing. They whiled away centuries like that. Rose Lalonde’s metallic shell did not change- although you could make the mistake of thinking the slight bronzing was rust, she did not change. Dirk began shuddering in and out of visibility, flickering back and forth in a flashstep tempo only he could hear. He got forgetful, and the rare glimpses you could spot of him, his face had lost all definition, and all that expressed his emotions were his shades and eyebrows. What a motherfucking story they told. Mainly disinterest, as he smote someone for being evil, and someone else for being too good, guiding, nurturing, _pruning_ as he saw it, guaranteeing the success of his project.

He can’t be blamed for what happened. The corridors of the mind become a cave’s tunnels, difficult to navigate, difficult to organise. The calculation was 90%. He would kill 90% of his creations, letting the survivors regain their footing in fear. He didn’t think it would be as bad as it was. A momentary blip, a digit not carried in the tens place.

They were all dead.

He rebuilt, of course, beginning again with his new species, power-levelling them through life- five years after they worked out aeroplanes, there were plans to get to one of the planet’s moons. But the tower was built on narrow stilts.

Rose Lalonde, she was in a capricious mood. I respect that. She knocked a stilt out. Maybe she also miscalculated. It’s more likely she worked everything out perfectly, she was just doing the wrong sums. She regarded herself as her brother’s equal. He did not.

Her civilisation burned, and coughed on the smoke. Their houses in flames, they ran out, only to see a flickering shadow of a man. A child opened their mouth, to call out to the stranger and ask for help- their parents were trapped in the house. The call died in their throat as they saw the burning torch.

Unlike his, her civilisation did not die completely. “Dirk Strider” became more than a bogeyman to these creatures, he became a reaper. A fully-established part of the food chain, unavoidable. Their numbers dwindled, five thousand, four, then two, then five hundred. A family member would be talking, and then they would be dead, and blue-green blood would spurt from what passed for their necks.

Such a waste. With a garrotte, you can keep all that lovely paint inside. Miracles which the bogeyman was not partial to.

Soon, the last member of the species, a tough old bird, awoke to find his companions’ sleeping bags saturated in turquoise. He felt fear, but also relief. The worst had happened- he was all that was left. Rose Lalonde watch from afar, unable to act to save her creation, unable to retaliate, for what was there left that Dirk cared about?

He sat, silently, beside the old man for a long time. He grunted. “I’m the last one. Enjoy your last piece of sport.” I record his last words, because he has a right to them. Let nobody ever say I neglect my duties.

Dirk said nothing. The old man stared the old God down. He had earned the capital now, for he was all a God could be.

Those may have been the old man’s last words, but he lived three years more. Dirk asked him if he felt fear. He asked him if he wanted his family back, he promised him a civilisation, a crown, a plough, a damnation, a salvation. “Say the word. Say any word, and I’ll bring them back,” he taunted. He considered. “No. Not any word. Say my name. You know it.”

He was starting to forget, himself. It had been so long that he had never heard it. He heard the whispers, but he could never parse their syllables.

“Say it,” he whispered. “Say it,” he cagouled. “Say it,” he threatened. “Say it,” he pleaded. The old man stayed silent.

He cursed to himself, a low growl emanating from something in his throat that human nor troll had. Lalonde smirked. She had found the last thing he cared about. She had unmoored him, unhinged him. She had hidden his name from him. But the old man was not her doing, she could not force him to hide it. He was choosing to hide it.

Dirk, not that he could read the name I write, paced, like a wolf, with a deep frustration. What’s left without a name? Where does he end, and his actions begin, where does the outside stop at his welcome mat and his house, the entire culmination of his reality, begin?

The fool had believed he could become the ultimate version of himself. But when you average out every single version of yourself, your slightly fuzzy edge extends out into a gigantic halo of self that permeates everything around you for miles and wicked miles. He himself had instilled the old man with his own stubbornness, and the old man had in turn gotten deep under his skin.

Lalonde, by this time, was rusted to the degree that you might have mistaken her for a discontinued pile of scrap, only a slight whirring giving away the calculations within. Moss grew over her metallic plates, and she became a feature of a forest somewhere, stalked by a wolf that cursed and growled and howled, searching incessantly for its name.

The thinking metal and the nameless bogeyman. Their extremely potent presence poisoned the planet. Were any creature to evolve even simple sentience, it would be driven to madness by the clouds, filled with strange dreams of a computer and the deep longing of a beast.

They lasted four thousand years in total, before their planet became so saturated with their loathing that nothing new would grow. Their games seemed like they would be endless, dancing out a competition through the stars until the stars themselves blinked out. A staring contest with the universe that they would win. Their grand ambitions lay as rubble at history’s feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dirk and Rose are incredibly steady people, almost computers: they follow a precise algorithm for actions, and if the algorithm isn’t refined as time goes on, it declines, and they do more and more outlandish or confusing things as they follow faithfully lines that don’t make sense.  
> Code, looping forever, is their legacy. Retaliation and retribution, built on misunderstanding the numbers they're calculating.


	3. The deep down dark deep down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feferi, and a witch's life when she sees and seals her own fate.
> 
> Slight warning for the ocean, and brief mentions of violence

Many others had left the planet they began on in this time. Feferi had gone searching for life. My wicked heiress was no fool. She knew what was in store for them all. I think she remembered me, my descent. Highblood dementia, godtier mania, and time spent alone in a void chuckling at jokes and heresies, she concluded, had cracked me. She gave in to it all in just 200 years, more or less willingly. I visited her once. I’m not supposed to, I chronicle, not shoot the wicked shit, but I couldn’t help it. It’s not the last time I interfered, either.

A deep, dark ocean inhabited by the creepiest motherfuckers I’d ever seen, and at the bottom, she’d laid out sprawling octopus’ tentacles and sated her hunger periodically by grabbing some poor creature with them and ripping it to shreds. I never found out if she ate them.

The creatures down there made Earth and Alternia’s oceans look like a petting zoo. A kraken sucking water in and out enough to make a fucking tide.

I talked with her, as much as she could talk, but that’s okay. I was out of practice as well. A stream of bubbles, and she started communicating.

 _Food?_ She asked. I chuckled.

_Everything’s food, my fishbitch, but I ain’t food for you._

Her eyes (pale, pupilless) widened, and she squealed. _Gamzee!_

I smiled. _What’s up my wicked sister?_

She glubbed. _Hungry. So hungry. All the time._

I laughed, and brine filled my lungs in place of air. _Plenty of fucking calamari all around you, why don’t you eat that?_

She rolled her eyes. _HUNGRY. No food, just hunger. No thoughts, either._ She glubbed playfully.

It was pretty clear she was going through the same thing as I had. Fixation on a feeling. Hers was the feeling of feeding, mine had been the texture of blood on a concrete wall.

This entire water planet was filling with brine. It wouldn’t kill the animals like it would over thousands of years on Deltrius, but the cephalopods and crustaceans and everything else were all twisting or twisted, like her. Spreading out, getting bigger as they fed on the free energy of a Witch of Life.

I left when she made a tentative swipe at me, as if to test the waters of whether I was food. Her hunger was even outweighing the lucidity of seeing an old friend. I visited her a few hundred years later, and while she had become even more monstrous, spread out, growing until my fist was the size of one of her eyes, she hadn’t yet recovered from the mental taxation of that short conversation.

She had totally surrendered to the process in a way which nobody else had, and her power consumed her, and she consumed it in turn, energy curling out into the ocean around her as she came to resemble a young version of the creature that raised her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feferi is basically the example of how far this can go, if you just go for it. It’s not a brilliant existence, but she knows what she’s in for. This isn’t so much giving in as it is diving in. She’s decided it’s better to go mad on her own terms.  
> Plus, her upbringing has always been that the ocean is comforting, and that leviathans are more comforting than they are terrifying.


	4. Cyanide as a sweetener

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Glade used to refer not only to a clearing area in a woods, but one with sunshine. It shares a root with the word glad.
> 
> When your friends were hurt, and you couldn't stop it then, what do you do if you have the power to stop it now?
> 
> In this case, overcompensate. Horrifically.
> 
> Warning for mentions of eugenics (no details, but it is mentioned, in context of Alternia's system). Stay safe.

Kanaya is next. She’s significant in that she didn’t undergone the process that consumed Dirk and Feferi and Rose. Or, at least not in the same way.

She found some world, filled with primitive creatures, and nurtured them. She saved them from predators, she helped with the difficult birthing process of their species. She killed infants too weak to survive, or just those that held undesired traits. Her matronly attitude found her coddling and culling in equal measure. The lesson of Alternia had for her been that letting weakness exist is a cruelty that she should avoid. Perhaps if Alternia had been less cruel to her and her friends, she wouldn’t have attempted what she did.

The creatures grew complacent with this system. It was only natural that the weak should be killed. Eugenics was not a dirty word to them, it was their way of life, as Kanaya’s matriarchy built itself around the questionable goal of minimizing all suffering. The word for kill, kindess, and parent all came to be _Cannayia_. Children played hopscotch, and went to classes, and were kind to all they met. Children were taught how to kill their parents if they showed signs of growing infirm.

With a God protecting them, they should have had the security to expand, sprawl out and pursue art and meaning. Instead, they found themselves limited to one circular valley, the brave few who went beyond the three-kilometre circular border being banned from returning. Creatures howled and chattered outside the border, but they never found their way in- all that remained was sweet birdsong (carefully bred to produce only pleasing melodies, and the rejects thrown to the creatures outside the gate).

Eventually, fewer and fewer people left the gladed valley, and children never asked what was outside their bubble.

They could have been knowledgeable, but they were comfortable. Maryam’s influence kept all the creatures at bay, forcing them back and away from the village she had built.

In this time, Kanaya had never given up talking, started twisting, or lifted herself above the creatures she protected. She appeared to them to just be a particularly old member of their tribe.

I believe she has rather spread her twisted tendrils through the valley, the people and animals in it, and their perception of reality. A cloying sort of parentage, that stifles development and protects from danger without asking the crucial question of whether the danger is worth it.

It’s my theory, although it may not be my job to write theory, that she detached from her power, and it permeated across the valley, letting crops and livestock flourish, while the people shared poetry about the same three kilometres squared, painted the beautiful trees, enjoyed the temperate sunshine. The birds that sang the one same song, over and over: the bridal march. A song from a long-gone human world that reminded her, just a bit, of her long-gone human wife.

It’s hardly a surprise to me that they all went mad. Add monotony, false fucking beauty, and comfort, remove mistakes, ambition, and diversity, genetic and social, and everyone can be maddened by the one same event.

And Kanaya went mad right along with them. She wasn’t a God anymore, she was mortal, same as her charges. Her power was immortal, and long after the birds had startled in fear of the screeching, broken people, the gladed land was temperate, the weather was always clear and perfect, the animals were passive and mild, and the fruit from the trees was sweet and nourishing. No predator could ever find itself inside the valley.

The species lived on, having not been “purified” by Kanaya’s choking paradise, in the people who had been forced out of the glade. While the Sylph’s power isolated them from the outside world, the outside world moved on. They made art of infinitely more beauty than those inside had ever seen, or could ever even conceive, in their narrow world view.

They built towns and cities and villages. They loved life and happiness, but they didn’t shy away from pain and difficulty. They survived. And they held wakes for the ones that didn’t. Sadness and happiness mixed, and they shed tears while they danced. They passed around a bottle of whatever the dead had liked most – milk, vodka, capri-sun – and recalled their best memories.

Kanaya tried to protect them. But growing up can mean confronting pain. She never allowed them to do that.

I remember a human telling me once, that cats in the wild don’t meow. Kittens stop meowing when their parent stops responding to it, but when they never do, there’s no reason to stop.

Maryam meant well, and in the short term, it always feels kinder to coddle someone with a scraped knee, to replace the gravel field they played on with soft grass so they can never do it again. A child would fall out of a tree, and the trees would get shorter, or their branches would be high out of a child’s reach.

A few hundred years in, and I wonder if they could have left, even if Kanaya and her power disappeared. Guess we'll never know.

It’s weird to think that of all the gods and Gods, she’d be the one to do such terrible things in the name of kindness. Looks like she fairly abandoned the auspisticism of her youth.

She wanted to kill me but didn’t, back in the showdown. I think that was what did it. Crazy, not finishing me off right then. It was difficult, yes, but it would’ve been the best thing to do, to just fucking kill me, claim her rightful place as the one that does the dirty work nobody else is willing to do.

Because Karkat saved me. We’ll get to him.

But it must have driven her mad. It must’ve made her decide that _I_ should never happen again, that she wouldn’t _let_ it happen again.

I take no blame for that. She decided to let me live, then she decided that she shouldn’t have. Both her choices, and to say otherwise would be disregarding her agency.

Anyway. I’m not here to wax poetic about my history with these people. I’m here to record what they became. And she became dead.

Her body must’ve been eaten by the songbirds she taught to chirp, because I could never find her remains, and the bridal march still continues, long after all other food should have run out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kanaya just dies. It’s a harsh narrative, but never mind that. Kanaya doesn’t so much choose eugenics as she does just end up there. She’s so bent on protecting life and making it happy, she’s never asked whether these people need her to ‘fix’ them.  
> Like all eugenics, it begins with warped good intentions- believing somebody’s life not to be worth living (often for racist, ableist or otherwise bigoted reasons) and making that decision for them.  
> Hers is the most politically salient Eldritching I’ve written as of a few chapters ahead, because it actually answers the question the intro raises- how does the crown twist people? Kanaya’s in the Pyro goggles from TF2- she sees a rosy society she’s lending a hand to, and maybe children she never got to raise with Rose, when the reality of her actions is that she’s drowning a kid with a hunched back on the fault premise that they won’t or can’t have as full a life as their peers.


	5. The wind howls because it's alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What's left when Egbert fades away?

John Egbert is an interesting one. Became the wind. Faded into nothing. Must’ve been that wicked wound in her chest, even reverberating across universes that shouldn’t rightly connect. You hear him, sometimes, when she’s on the wind, almost ever-present. But nothing lasts forever. In a couple billion years that’ll go by like blinks, the air will get slowly stripped off the planet, everything will go still, even the wind. Maybe he’ll come back then, corporealize in the ashes of a planet whose day is done, and weep in the remnants of civilisation. I don’t know. Even I’ll be dead, long before then. June Egbert will long outlast us all. Maybe he’ll even outlast the universe. Sitting in the wreckage of the cosmic symphony, atop the singularity and below the infinite plane.

All I know is that the weather on the planet is less predictable than it was before. An area previously a tornado belt felt no wind whatsoever, whereas one shitty statue of liberty had a tempest whip around it with fifty times the strength, the wind making odd keening noises as it remembers its friends now gone. John was the only one not to leave the planet. Except for me, technically, in my visits.

She almost appeared to me once, a wind vibrating through itself into something corporeal-adjacent. I head just one word before it blew itself out. “gamzee.” Kind of chilling to hear my own name like that, but I guess it’s not the first time someone’s said it.

I visited a few more times, and just sat down to chat. It was a one-sided conversation, but I don’t think either of us minded one fucking bit. I talked to some descendants of the descendants of the civilisation the gods had built, and they all said the wind was calmer when I arrived, and more agitated when I left.

A massive cyclone centred on the north pole of the planet (nothing but open ocean there, unlike Alternia or Earth). When I arrived, June showed me their handiwork excitedly. I smiled as my hair whipped into my face and the salty spray made itself known on my tongue when I talked.

I don’t think he will ever be able to corporealize again. But I don’t think she needs to.

I never visited again. It was too cruel, to almost be able to touch an old friend you hardly knew, but never quite make it. For a while, I watched from afar as they channelled all the wind on the planet into a gigantic shield to deflect a meteor headed straight for the planet. The impact wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. But the wind limped around the planet from then on. I think it’ll bear that limp forever.

John’s case is almost the exact opposite of Kanaya’s. Instead of detaching from her powers, they entirely withdrew into them. I just wish we hadn’t all abandoned him like that. But we all had our reasons for leaving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gamzee is right that June’s case is the opposite of Kanaya’s. He’s not running from anyone, and from her perspective, everybody’s running from them. They withdraw into himself and instead of being twisted by his powers, John simply is them.


	6. A few stories, not too sad.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happened to Equius, Roxy, and Vriska?

I can’t find a fucking thing about Equius, except for a few times I’ve talked with Roxy. I know he faded in and out of reality, much like Dirk did in his earlier years of decline. But instead of moving very quickly back and forth in any of the three standard directions, Equius would fade in and out of another dimension. I could only see him by the hole he left in objective reality.

I’d like to have talked to him. I’d like to have seen the motherfucker I killed in cold blood. Maybe that’s why I can’t find him. He doesn’t want to be found.

I’ll meet him some day, I’m sure. Miracles are just impossibilities with time added in. Until then, if I feel a chill down my spine and a gaze behind broken glasses, I'll think of him. My first subjuggulation.

It’s a bitch to not be able to finish this account, but that’s all I got. Dude’s gone, and I think he wants to stay that way.

* * *

I found Roxy on a pockmarked planet. The whole thing was a massive hollow sphere, with yawning holes in it leading to the centre. The centre had a black hole.

There’s a motherfucking _metaphor_ there.

Anyway, he is not one of the ones that was twisted by his power. He hardly ever used the void that permeated around him. But he shoved things into the black hole, keeping the void fed and continuing to grow the accretion disc around it, painted yellow-purple hues as it spirals into oblivion.

Void players freak me out.

Roxy and I had a few conversations over the years. He finds my honks funny, and I think his typos are cute.

Void players freak me out.

* * *

Vriska had totally embraced her power, but she’s a thief, remember. Taking all the benefits with none of the costs. The wicked sister hasn’t changed a bit, and now the _Octarine Marquise_ flies between galaxies raiding treasure and dumping it into Roxy’s black hole. I don’t think she even knows he’s there or what she’s been doing with the treasure she worked so hard to collect. And in her fingers, she twirls dice so loaded with good or bad luck that even I can see it as pinpricks of motherfucking miracles, yellow like sunlight and purple like bruises.

I originally thought she had been affected by her power, because her hair was swirling like she was underwater, and her face was twisted into a rictus of coveting. She sniffed through solar winds for gold and gems and set course to ram transport shuttles and cruise liners. I watched her sink the last escape ship of a dying world for a kilogramme of gold.

But she’d been building up her terrifying image, the effects were more of an aesthetic than a manifestation. Fucking thieves. But maybe even she can’t outrun the mental effects.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reason these are all together is because they’re shorter, and there’s a little bit of interplay between each of them. Also Octarine, and the yellow-purple aesthetics of the black hole and Vriska’s piracy are references to Terry Pratchett. The concept of GNU also briefly comes up later on.
> 
> Equius and Roxy represent void, but each of them in different ways- Equius is the lacking of knowledge, sort of like he's subtracting from reality, whereas Roxy's is an addition, he maintains a black hole as a physical version of void itself.
> 
> Vriska is a thief, certainly, but she has never limited her thieving to just Light. She's a force for uncertainty in the universe, and her thing has always been gaining without losing. She doesn't sacrifice anything (think when she lost an eye and an arm and Terezi lost her eyesight- of them, Vriska gets hers back almost immediately), and so her eldritching is more subtle. She thinks she's using it free of charge, but she's slowly losing the ability to stop using it.


	7. Jaded murmurs of a purpose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jade's story- how a mighty tree might bear scars from a long time ago. Scars which the maker might not even fully remember.

Jade ran, ran from the Terra Nova she’d helped create, and the friends she’d made, and out into space, blinking back and forth across parsecs and planets and everywhere she went, you could track her by the spatial aberrations she left – a civilisation worshipping in a temple the size of a shed, that can fit 30,000 worshipping in it, a normal-sized filing cabinet with documents the size of sticky notes in it. She landed on a small planetoid, the size of Kanaya’s valley. She stared up at a formation in the sky. From any other point than on this glorified rock, the stars were random blinks and blips, but for here and here alone, she had arranged a galaxy into the shape of a hexagon, a thousand million suns, and a perfect snowflake hung in the sky, dominating the sky.

She was so still, hands outstretched to manipulate the stars into beautiful shapes over eons, that she looked like a great oak tree, boughs twisted by forces acted upon them a decade ago.

Space had started to grow and shrink, her powers flexing tendrils of influence into the surrounding areas.

She had decided to live alone, but she still has an influence on the entire universe. She warped stars into tiny spheres of light that orbit her planetoid, in fair defiance of physical reality.

When you give gods power, it is only a matter of time before they become Gods. It is only a matter of time before they use that power.

Looking at her was like a localised kaleidoscope – she had her arms raised up, but shift in your seat and she was recoiling, another and she was pulling with all her might, reigning stars to her will. That much space concentrated in herself? She had cracked time open and scooped its insides out. Everything she did was happening at once, and I saw them all like wicked frames of a video printed off and compared side by side.

From there, I could see the entire galaxy from every perspective at once, in miraculous clarity. It must be easy to get trapped in it, examining every square inch.

I forgot my choleric temper, looking at it. There’re different ways to make face paint without sullying your hands in blood. But it didn’t last long, and with a rictus grin, I left her to her work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jade’s education has consisted of Grandpa Harley and a dog — nobody ever taught her how to reach out emotionally, and how to set appropriate goals. She’s constellationising for no real reason other than it’s a task she knows will take thousands of years, and she can pretty much lock herself off in it. In this timeline, the pressures which forced everybody together -fear, friendship, danger- all get unmoored. The gods don’t even need to eat, so even meeting for food isn't natural. There’s no reason why they should all still chat and stay in touch, save for shared traumas. So when people started leaving, leaving her behind in her mind, Jade ran to take her mind off things.
> 
> Time is cracking around her because space is edging it out.


	8. A story happy and sad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karkat and Dave fled decaying friendships together. Then they fled death together. But running doesn't last forever. Not even for gods.
> 
> This is the one which I made the rest of the fic for. It's not the one which inspired everything else, but it's the one which matters, the one I'd save if the metaphorical house was burning down.

Dave and Karkat were together 'til the end. ‘til Karkat’s end, anyways.

They lived together, and their power leaked into each other. They spent an eternity together, indescribable in their relationship. Some called it love, some called it friendship, some even had the fucking audacity, the _heretical fucking gall_ to call it hate. But whatever it was called, it won’t ever do them justice, save for saying they are as close to the miracles of the mirthful messiahs as I have ever seen.

It was always Dave’s fate outlive him. While the gods can become Gods without godtier (as much as I am fucking proof), it doesn’t hurt to get that levelling in. And Karkat was never made to last long for this, or any other, bitch of a universe. My miracle mutant bro has always lived fast and bright.

But what does time mean for a Knight of Time? Dave protected his best bro boyfriend from the whips and scorns of time as best he could, and they spent thousands of sweeps together. Tendrils of blood and time crept inwards, though, and increasingly, they could smell the rust they had for so long avoided. The rust of stale time and stale blood. Dave moved them, kept them moving, delaying the inevitable for years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years. For a time player, it was child’s play to snatch the years back.

But protecting a loved one is not so easy, when they know they have to face the thing you want to protect them from.

They found an isolated planet, with no remarkable features, except that the planet had a name, and that their powers were slow to reach them here, edged out by other forces. And Dave could hear whispers. When Karkat was away, walking alone, the voices subsided, but when they were together, blood called blood, and voices whispered in Dave’s ear that he _was metal and that he was a Strider, and that he was dead and alive and Ultimate_.

Deltrius was the name of the planet, in case you were wondering.

Dave could never have hated, never have hurt, never have _thought_ of hurting Karkat, but he hated the whispers. Harsh, brittle, and nagging, promising he could be a king with a crown he didn’t want. They spent more time apart, and with this, Dave’s ability to halt Karkat’s decline sputtered out.

Karkat, for his part, was protecting his Knight from the calls of blood he was inducing. The distance he put between them was to prepare Dave for their parting and protect him from the insidious whispers that told him to follow his relatives into hubris, arrogance not _towards_ the Gods, but _of_ them.

Two knights is a relationship that shouldn’t work. They made it work. Til death did them part, even.

When they met each other, after a month of absence, Dave could tell it was happening, that this would be the last time. The whispers were louder, now, and Karkat’s face was lined with strain. Old by just six thousand.

“No,” he breathed.

Karkat shrugged. “Afraid so.” There were tears in his eyes, and his wrinkled hands were clasped. “Don’t cry.”

Dave was crying, but Karkat couldn’t tell through the shades.

“Don’t cry. Two crying knights is too much.”

Dave choked out a laugh. “People will think we’re a couple or something.”

“Yeah.” Karkat shifted awkwardly. Neither of them was good at this, and neither had the fortitude for an Irish goodbye. “They’d be right, though?” He added, hopefully. They’d spent thousands of years avoiding that question, trying to just do without thinking about if they were doing it _right_.

“I don’t want to let go,” Dave continued. “I don’t do well on my own.”

“I know, idiot,” Karkat snipped back, but there was no force behind it. “But you’re not alone; Time and blood forges a bond that even death won’t break.”

“You mean that?” Dave asked. Now he was hopeful. “We’ll be together forever?”

Karkat’s heart stopped for a second. “Yeah. Yeah,” he lied. “I’m dying, but I’m not _going_ anywhere.” He snorted to cover the sound of his heart breaking. “God, you’re always worrying over nothing. Remember the volcano?”

“Yeah, the, uh,” Dave stuttered through the memory. “We lived on that planet with the big fuck off mountain, and I made us move when it blew up.”

Karkat considered it. “In hindsight, you were right to panic about that one. I don’t know why I wasn’t worried about columns of flame that went out of the inner atmosphere.”

Dave remembered the flakes of rust that had poured into the atmosphere after the eruption. But there hadn’t been any at the time. The rust was just already covering his memories.

“How long have you got?” Dave asked. His boyfriend shrugged.

“A day? Maybe two. Again, I’ll be dead, but that’s a useless concept at this point, I’ll probably come back as the world’s angriest butterfly or something.”

They talked deep into the night, relishing in the time they had left. Stopping Karkat’s time might have saved him, but it left him tasting iron on his tongue, his nose blocked and stuffy, his sight vignetted at the edges. He looked with fresh eyes at his boyfriend’s face. For the first time in a long time, he could see through the shades, past the stoic façade he had put up since his early three hundreds and the rust began creeping in. As the day rose to greet them, Karkat’s breath became shallower, and he began to drift off to sleep. When Dave woke, he was gone.

The funeral was short and sweet. Dave invited everyone he could. Only I came.

We buried the angry miracle’s body in a clearing, where a mossy tree had died. A wolf howled in the distance.

“What do I do now,” he asked me.

“I can’t do that for you, my brother.”

“Please,” he begged. “How do I move on?”

“From Karkat?” I chuckled. “You can’t. Be glad of that. You don’t want to forget him.”

He cried, and I offered my shoulder.

Karkat’s ending is not the same as Dave’s, though. As far as I know, he goes by the Strident now.

He walks through reality, and I have never seen his face, but for the shades he wears. Like the bogeyman’s face, and Lalonde’s too, it went completely blank, but for one feature, the rounded sunglasses. The man carries his grief across the universe and back.

Space is becoming crowded with Gods by this point. The _Octarine Marquise_ besets it with piracy and fear, Roxy keeps a destructive void in equilibrium and contains it. Jade is twisting it as she herself twists slowly, forming shapes with it that make sense while being nonsense.

You would expect nobody to want to leave their own home planets, to avoid the dangers that space so obviously contained. But the Strident weaves sad beats through stars and supernovae, a pulse that astronomers use to anchor themselves. He is a living traffic forecast, weaving beats into an almost universal map of danger and disaster. As the Octarine searches for treasure and victims, she is thwarted by the warnings of the Strident. And when people tune their instruments into his broadcasts, they also hear Karkat’s name.

Karkat Vantas, for his part, was wrong in assuming he would be gone. He was dead. But like things bigger on the inside will eventually leak to the outside, his massive heart, and his powers of blood eventually leaked out into the graveyard that is Deltrius.

The wildlife in Deltrius, which had been suffering since the bogeyman and Lalonde’s arrival, bounced back. Their powers clashed, briefly, but Karkat’s washed all their oppositions away.

The grass grew rust red, the trees in an eternal Autumn, to honour his lover.

The bogeyman howled and gnashed as his pacing no longer inspired fear, and the ticking machine Lalonde went into a loop of error, error, error, error, error, the perfectly constructed logic of the Seer breaking as love was shoved into an equation which its designer and user had both never imagined it to be in.

This graveyard of Gods gained a new member.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was my favourite one to write, because holy shit it was emotional to write. It also helps recontextualise the bogeyman and Lalonde as a more tragic story- You’re not going to inevitably start hating each other when you spend eternity with someone(s), they were just an incredibly toxic match for each other.
> 
> The problem with Dave and Karkat is that Karkat’s role in the narrative has always been a catalyst for other people’s change. Think of the Sufferer, or even of Karkat’s relationship advising. Even his blood colour reinforces what Gamzee says- the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Karkat’s candle is a supernova, and Dave’s attempts to preserve it only end up decreasing quality of life in favour of quantity.
> 
> Dave’s eldritching is so tragic, because the options he was presented with was let Karkat go early, maybe 100 years in, or stop the ticking of time for a million years, until Karkat felt like butter scraped over too much bread. He went pretty much in the middle, until it was plain and clear that delaying any longer would be cruel to both of them. His eldritching shows how you can twist love, but it remain love- he strides among the stars, beating out a sad tempo, but it’s never negative, just melancholy.


	9. Anglerfish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aesthetic of creatures that seem like stilted people, but hide monstrous wholes is a really creepy one.

Sollux left immediately. Why should he not have? He was a ghost as long as he was on the planet, and as he left and regained his powers, he pushed his way back into reality through sheer spite. He was trailed by Aradia, watching with a Cheshire smile as he doomed himself.

He found himself gaining more and more energy as he journeyed. He began to go faster and faster, trying to burn the energy as quickly as it was accumulated, but eventually, it began to outstrip his ability to fling it out behind himself, and he began to leak red-blue sparks as his hands gripped his shoulders and screamed silently into the vacuum of space. He eventually found his way to a planet, crashing through its atmosphere at incredible speeds. In the crater he created, not a scratch was on him, save for a slight crack in the red lens of his glasses. Aradia began to giggle.

His arms flung out wide, and energy flew from them in geysers. It leaked from every pore, wisping into the air and then dispelling. A scream ripped from his throat, and the raw sound echoed for a year. The planet, already covered by deep clouds, filled with red-blue lightning, and the residents of the planet, who until now had thought themselves in some massive cavern, now watched in terror as their crops were eradicated by fire, and the clouds above them released their heavy water and floods engulfed the planet.

Sollux did not mean for this to happen. He might as easily have landed on an extinct planet. But nonetheless, the people were doomed.

His power continued to grow, and eventually even his explosive arcing became too small a vector to remove the power from him. The planet became criss-crossed with psiioniics, becoming one all-consuming battery, to which Sollux had plugged himself in. For a while, he returned to normal. But soon, even the planet’s mass couldn’t soak up the energy he was accumulating. He broke through the atmosphere, and travelled out, further out that he had ever been. And behind him, Aradia’s giggling grin became a broad smile, wicked as a motherfucker can be.

Sollux crashed into the edge of the universe at many times the speed of light. He pounded on it, screaming to be let out, to get away from the energy pooling at his fingertips even as he did so.

He shoved his hands into the barrier and began to pour his energy through. The barrier sucked it up greedily, and it looked for a moment as if he would be free.

The energy arced across the entire spherical barrier, and everywhere at once, the universe started to expand. Slowly at first, in fact just a centimetre in the first year. But as his power continued to grow, Sollux fed more and more energy in, and the growth began to grow. And then that began to grow, and soon he was screaming as he doomed the entire universe to unspooling.

Aradia cackled delightedly from her perch atop the barrier, her feet dangling over the edge gently, as her role as Maid of Death was fulfilled. She had set the universe’s time limit. Nothing, so she thought, could escape that.

As we know, that will not be the case.

Mage comes from an old word for make. Sollux may have set the universe’s expansion in motion, but it was not just a change, it in of itself made something.

The energy of the outer bounds of the universe was almost unlimited, even if any given area had little more than a trickle.

Creatures spontaneously generated or evolutionarily expanded, to fill the niche. Free energy is a rare thing in the universe. Like on Feferi’s planet, where megafauna flourished, creatures deep and creepy clicked and chattered and creaked around the edge-lands, consuming anything they could find. An anglerfish the size of a whale floated by silently, consuming a writhing eel sixteen kilometres long. A creaking preceded the entrance of a creature I have no words for. It’s nothing like anything I’ve ever seen. Meteors were filled with long, spindly creatures with only touch.

They are all very quiet, save for the occasional noises of a creature shifting or feeding. In the quieter moments, the seconds where nothing else is making sound, I can hear a demented giggle, from the girl who is always just outside my periphery, disappearing just slowly enough for me to catch her grin, just quickly enough to miss everything else.

Like Equius, I can’t find anything on Aradia, and I think she likes it that way. I’ll let her have her privacy, because I have already guessed at her motives. She still serves another, like a Maid often does.

Sollux unmoored himself from the barrier eventually. Now he drifts aimlessly, eyes blown out once more from overexertion. Most of his energy is still being fed straight to the barrier, but occasional wisps dispel from his skin as he swims through space with his mouth and unseeing eyes wide open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The concept that Sollux becomes a battery for entropy and decay, and that Aradia has subtly manipulated him into it is quite tragic, given their ancestors. It also fills in a gap I needed to patch for the next chapter- a bubble of expanding empty space at the edge of the universe, filled with abominations. Whatever could it be? The disclarity between evolution or generation is interesting, because the energy comes out of nowehere, so why shouldn’t the creatures? On the other hand, evolution is essentially the process of slightly twisting something, and seeing if it makes it fitter for purpose.
> 
> Either way, they’re based on a synthesis of the album art of Hawaii Part II and the first episode of TMA, 'Angler fish.' It's a cosmic horror vibe I'm going for.


	10. VR1SK4 // wwe wwho didnt make it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If this is an essay on power, these two are difficult to write for. That's reflected in the length of this chapter.

Terezi was dead before she could wield her power enough for it to stick around after she died. I sometimes think she was the wisest of us all, her own power letting her understand that she shouldn’t use it, lest she be twisted like the rest of us. Seer of Mind gives you a bit of immunity to being twisted. Twisting is a factor of making each small choice, without realising the whole is that you're losing control.

If I find her body, I’ll put it on Deltrius; it’s only fair. But I doubt I will. She floated through that void for a long time, and Sollux’s power populated that void with creatures. Eating a god, even a lower-case god, has a profound effect on creatures. I believe the effect in this case was to create fresh horrorterrors. The energy from a Mage of Doom, the body of a Seer of Mind, and the service of a Maid of Time. The outer bubble of the edge of the universe is slowly filling with many-angled limbs.

* * *

I don’t think Eridan even make into the new universe. Not all the ghosts did, and not all of them were lucky enough to resurrect like Feferi or Sollux did.

It’s a shame, of course. But looking at how the other gods and Gods ended up, I don’t think “faded into obscurity” is necessarily such a bad thing.

Then again, it might've been nice to see the asshole again. He's given me some mirth over the years. And I think Hope is perhaps unique, in that its gods run through their power very quickly. Time and space might be infinite, and by definition the void is eternal. But hope, it tends to run out. Runs counter to what people say, that the miracle of hope is one which shows up anywhere it's wanted.

It's a shame, then, that I can't chronicle the fishbitch's time as a god. The Prince of Hope could've worked miracles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Terezi's shorter narrative is a consequence of Vriska's shorter narrative. After all, Terezi's post-canon arc is mostly looking for Vriska, someone who, as we see in both this and HS2, isn't reciprocating that loyalty to the same degree.
> 
> I could add to Vriska's bit, but I think she fits better as a background menace than she does as a real antagonist, and she's always been so set on doing a thing that she missed Terezi. And in this world, John didn't have a chance to visit Terezi before she withdrew completely.
> 
> As for Eridan, being a dick as a kid and then dying doesn't leave a lot to work with vis a vis creating an eldritch horror. Eridan was killed off just before Homestuck started getting in the kids' heads, so there ain't much to work with.


	11. one becomes one billion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this’ll be a loaded one. Like, given what happened post-canon.  
> I don’t totally vibe with the direction the epilogues took them in, especially the batterfascist angle- Jane had flaws, especially around communication issues, which I feel like could’ve been delved into, but from a narrative perspective, it essentially added a whole new character dimension with no time given to explore how it developed before it overtook her entire character.

Losing their gods one by one was a paranoia-inducing time for Earth C. Like taking stilts out from under a box, increasing pressure was put on the people who stayed. Eventually, John had gone AWOL, and she left behind just two human gods. Two human gods who’d been raised on nostalgia and idealism.

So, they rebuilt that white picket fence, and lived there quietly. And for a while, there wasn’t a problem. Society didn’t advance, because the two remaining Gods were clinging to the past. And, for a while, they did manage to create the world they wanted.

For a mostly-perfect week, Jake and Jane had sat in their house, and seen only quiet suburbia out their window. A PTA meeting about their five-year-old kid. A discussion about whether action movies were better if they were sci fi or grounded in reality.

Then, just before they went to bed on a Thursday, Jake turned on the TV, briefly, for the weather forecast. They’d spent a week in a cabin in Scotland for their honeymoon, listening to the shipping forecast at night as the rain pelted the cabin’s windows, so even if rain was less than meaningless to them, sometimes they liked to listen to the forecast.

“-protests are expected to last a few days, as peaceful demonstrations block access to public buildings to showcase the barriers trolls face to public services.”

Jane glanced up at that. “I’ve got to take Johnnie to the dentist tomorrow. I hope the protest’s not going to be an issue.”

“I mean, they are justified,” Jake added, as he took off his shoes on the edge of the bed.

“Oh, of course, yes,” Jane replied. “I’m not going to not support them because it inconveniences gods trying to get their kid’s teeth checked,” she laughed. Jake hummed in agreement.

“Howsabout I take Johnnie to the dentist’s tomorrow. Don’t worry about a thing,” Jake said, soothingly. “I perfected the art of patience in a waiting room when I picked June up from that therapy session that ran long.”

Jane smiled at her husband. “You’re already perfect. Thanks.” Jake grinned back at her. You could see why they were together. They were, in their best moments, perfect for each other.

Perhaps it was to do with his aspect. Hope is a powerful thing, and if you have a good life, hope can make it feel like that life is on offer for everyone else as well. But as I said, it’s not infinitely renewable, and it’s not totally durable.

But seventy years later, that hope became untenable. They were immortal. Their child was not. The funeral was a small affair. The fact that godhood was not inherited was a sad reality. There wasn’t grief as such, since they’d both known this was coming since their kid turned thirty and made a joke about looking older than his parents.

At the funeral, Johnnie’s daughter asked how they’d known their own son. They lied, said something about a trip their parents had met him on. Johnnie had loved travelling. His daughter nodded, said something reassuring, and left them. Jake cried, and all Jane could offer him was shoulder and a reassurance. They’d checked in on him over the years. He’d had a good life, and they’d known that, because they’d gotten to be there for him.

People on Earth C had mostly forgotten about the Gods that had walked among them one hundred years ago. It feels weird to say, but one hundred years of planetwide internet history means any specific thing got buried. The Gods didn’t do public things, and most of them had left.

Just a few decades years later, their one child had enough ancestors that they’d lost track. If they’d gone to all the funerals, they’d be there all year. I think that’s probably the part where they moved to the acceptance stage of grief over Johnnie’s death.

A couple hundred years, and the majority of humans on Earth C had some direct relation to Johnnie. That’s when they decided to leave. When the faces of half the people they saw reminded them of their dead child. Of all the times to leave, that was probably a good one.

I don’t actually know where they went, when they left. It’s difficult to admit, but none of my sources could find them, either. As far as I know, they’re out there, somewhere. Perhaps on a meteor, with a white picket fence. But I know they haven’t used their powers actively since.

Doc Scratch had pockets in his vision once, pockets you could sink a planet into. Perhaps they’re there, just out of view.

I’m not going to look for them. They want privacy. I’ll give it to them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going and giving sad endings to everyone, so fuck it, I gave a happy ending to the people that the epilogues seemed intent on giving bad ones to.


	12. mE, mOtHeRfUcKeR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who watches the watcher?

i’ve told their stories, I’VE FUCKING RECORDED THEIR LIVES. whatever this is, I’M ITS PROPHET, i’m the fucking storyteller.

well?

I’VE GOT A STORY TOO

**I know.**

and i deserve to be remembered

LIKE THEY DO

**You’ve done your job well.**

I RECORDED AS FAITHFULLY AS A FUCKER CAN.

**Well.**

**I wouldn’t go that far.**

what.

**You’ve done well, don’t get me wrong. Or is it… twisted?**

mighty fucking words from the one who doesn’t do their own dirty work.

**I never called you a perfect emissary, nor did I ever expect you to be.**

**Claiming so now would be deceitful.**

**You remember Feferi.**

…

**You aren’t supposed to talk to the subjects of the archiving. I don’t mind, it actually gave a better insight into her mind. But the fact remains, you weren’t perfect.**

**I’m not Doc Scratch. Your rule breaking wasn’t some master plan manipulation. I just trusted you to do your job, because we’re all people- and anyway, that isn’t what I’m talking about.**

stop speaking around it

TELL ME WHAT YOU FUCKING MEAN

what makes me less than perfect?

WHAT MARKED ME DOWN

i will break

EVERY BONE

in your body

THOSE STORIES KILLED ME

Hollowed me out inside

FUCKING LIVED INSIDE ME

karkat’s death.

I GAVE YOU HIS FUCKING DEATH.

what more do you want?

**The Truth.**

heh

FUCKING BULLSHIT

i gave you the truth

SEVEN THOUSAND YEARS OF TRUTH

**You gave the archive seven thousand years of stories. Those stories were good, but they weren’t always or all true.**

**Take Karkat’s death: the Strident walks leagues across the stars, in remembrance. But his presence isn’t just calming.**

hes doing his best.

YOU BEGRUDGE HIS FUCKING BEST?

**No, I just didn’t ask you to record him at his best. And you didn’t need to record Dirk at his best – no, don’t worry. He can’t hear the name from here. Anyway, you didn’t feel the need to extoll the virtues of the civilisation he built.**

**And in the Strident’s case, there areproblems. His grief acts as a guide through dangerous terrain, but it can also blow the sensors of observation points or even ships in transport. Only a dozen ships out of the millions he’s guided have been stranded by it, but you didn’t mention it.**

**And what about Aradia? You were guessing at her motives, but she loved Sollux, and while he might’ve been used, she didn’t do the using.**

**Again, I’m not blaming you. You did well. Part of the reason you haven’t been twisted like the others, even as your god and highblood partial immortalities run thin is because you’re not trying to serve a master, you’re just telling their stories.**

**If you had actually tried to record that Dirk was a good ruler, despite his despotism and phobocracy, that would be proof that you’ve lost sight of reality.**

**But I’m not going to push this on you: do you want your story recorded?**

**You can say no. You can walk out of this story, and you’ll never see what you’ll become. You can do what you want. You can do what you want, and I’m giving you a choice.**

**Do you want your story recorded?**

…

i don’t want it recorded by you.

**If you walk out now, your story will be lost. I’m an archivist, but I don’t have to record you. You’ve written books and books without an About The Author section. I’m the only one that can record your story, now. And I’m the only one who’ll know it and tell it. If you don’t get it recorded by me, you’ll effectively cease to exist.**

**Is that what you want? To be stricken from the record?**

**What good does that do you? If you’re gone, you can’t hear the stories of your friends. You won’t be able to remember them.**

then i won't remember them.

I DON’T NEED TO LIVE

and i don’t need their stories.

I RECORDED THEM, AND THAT’S ENOUGH FOR ME.

**You’ll die and you’ll be obscure.**

**Is that what you want?**

sure as shit, sister

**I- okay, I guess. That’s your decision.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Gamzee Makara is gone. He doesn’t want a story, not from me.**
> 
> **I’ll respect that.**
> 
> **And leave him in peace.**


End file.
